I Hope 34 Years Didn't Erase the Paper Trail

Today I'm going looking for court records from my childhood. I'm hoping I walk out carrying documents. Orders, filings, agreements, dates, names, whatever is still there. I'm also preparing myself for the possibility that 34 years is simply too long and some of it doesn't exist anymore. I don't know what I'll find today, which is exactly why I want to write this before I go.

There are things about my childhood that I don't need a court file to tell me happened. I was abused. I was a child. I was the victim.

I was four years old when I was picked up and thrown down the stairs. I remember the handprint bruise across my face afterward. In another incident, I was kicked in the head like a football, hard enough that I bit my tongue nearly in half.

Those sentences are horrible to write. They're probably horrible to read. But they happened to me, and I'm done finding softer words because they're easier for other people to hear.

For years I could call it trauma. I could say I had a bad childhood. I could talk about difficult summers or things that happened when I was young. All of those descriptions are technically easier, but they also put distance between me and what I'm actually talking about. I was abused.

And what I still don't understand is why I continued being sent back. My dad eventually got custody of me, yet I continued spending six weeks at a time during the summers there until I was eighteen. Somewhere there was a reason for that. Adults made decisions.

This wasn't some unrelated court file that might happen to contain pieces of my childhood. My childhood, my safety, and what was happening to me were at the heart of a custody case. My dad ultimately got custody of me. That is part of why the years that followed have never completely made sense to me.

Because even after that custody case, I still had to go back. Six weeks at a time during the summers, year after year, until I was eighteen. The abuse didn't become an abstract piece of family history just because a court proceeding ended. I was still the kid getting sent back into the life everyone had just fought over.

That's the part I need to understand. If my safety and where I should live were important enough to become the subject of a custody case, how did we get from there to me continuing to spend six weeks every summer in the place where I remember being abused? What exactly did the court decide? What did each parent ask for? What evidence was presented? What did the adults know?

Was summer visitation ordered by a judge, negotiated between my parents, changed later, or something else entirely? I don't know those answers yet. That's not me being careful for the sake of appearances. I genuinely don't know. I was the child.

Adults were making decisions about my life in courtrooms and conversations I wasn't part of, and then I lived whatever came out the other side. That's why I want the actual file so badly. I'm not searching for paperwork hoping it will prove that I was abused. I know what I remember happening to me.

I'm searching for the record of what the adults and the court knew, what they were told, what they decided, and why the hell I kept having to go back.

Maybe a judge ordered it. Maybe my parents reached some kind of agreement. Maybe there were changes over the years that I never knew about. I genuinely don't know, and I'm not going to manufacture an explanation now just because I've spent most of my life wanting one. That's what I'm going looking for today.

I want to know what the court actually said. I want to know what was filed. I want to know what agreements existed, if any. I want to understand what decisions were being made around me while I was the child who had to live with the consequences. Because six weeks wasn't a custody arrangement to me.

It was my summer. I knew it was coming. I knew where I was going. Then I had to live through it and somehow come back afterward and become a regular kid again.

That part is difficult to explain to somebody who wasn't inside my head. I remember coming back to school after those summers feeling empty. Other kids returned from summer vacation and life started again. I came back carrying something I didn't know how to explain, and then I was expected to sit at a desk, talk to other kids, do schoolwork and continue like whatever had happened over those weeks belonged somewhere else.

When I try to picture that version of myself now, the closest visual comparison I can find is the way some soldiers look after returning from war, or the emptiness I've seen in photographs of people after prolonged captivity. I am not saying what happened to me was literally the same experience as war or imprisonment. I'm trying to describe the person I remember coming home as: shoulders hanging, eyes empty, physically back but not completely there.

Then eventually I learned how not to be there at all. I blocked out a lot. That's another reason today matters so much to me.

Memory is complicated, especially across more than three decades. There are things I remember with horrifying clarity and other stretches of my childhood that feel much harder to reach. I don't want to fill those spaces with guesses just because I desperately want the story to finally make sense.

I want the paper. I want something created when this was actually happening. I want to be able to put what I remember beside what was written down at the time and see what survives between the two.

If a document contradicts something I've believed for years, I want to know that too. If it confirms something, I want to know. If it reveals something I never knew, I'll have to deal with that when I get there. And if it raises more questions, then those questions become part of this too.

I'm almost forty now. That makes all of this feel different. I have children of my own. I can look at them and understand how young a child actually is in a way I couldn't possibly understand when I was the child.

A kid doesn't understand custody law. A kid doesn't understand negotiations between parents, lawyers or courts. A kid doesn't know why the adults have decided where he is going to spend the next six weeks. He just knows he's being sent there.

I've spent a lot of my adult life trying not to look backward. Alcohol became part of that life for years. I've been sober for years now, and one of the strange things about finally being present for your own life is that eventually you start encountering the things you spent so long trying not to feel. Surviving something and processing it are not the same thing.

I survived my childhood. I grew up. I built a life. I became a husband and a father. I got sober. I kept moving.

But I don't think I ever really got to process all of this. Nobody sat me down and explained why I still had to go there. Nobody handed adult me the file and said, "Here. This is what happened." Nobody could know everything that happened to me during those summers because they weren't the child living through them. I spent years trying to make myself forget.

Maybe this is what this archive is actually for. I thought I was building somewhere to preserve my thoughts and ideas. A record of my family, things I've made, things I've wondered about, things I've gotten wrong, ordinary afternoons and whatever else eventually adds up to a human life. I still want that.

But maybe part of preserving a life is finally being willing to preserve the parts you spent decades trying to erase. This doesn't mean I'm going to put every detail of my childhood on the internet. I'm going to decide what belongs to me and what I want to reveal.

My wife and children deserve privacy. Other people's lives don't automatically become public property because they intersected mine. But I am not going to treat my own abuse as somebody else's secret. What happened to me is my story too.

I need somewhere I can finally say what happened without immediately minimizing it. Somewhere I can write down what I remember, then compare those memories with whatever historical record still exists. Somewhere I can distinguish between what I know, what I remember, what documents establish and what I may never be able to answer.

Maybe that's how I finally get some of this shit out of me. Not by pretending it didn't happen. Not by spending another thirty years hating people. Not by endlessly replaying fragments of childhood and trying to reverse-engineer decisions I wasn't old enough to understand.

By looking. By asking. By documenting. By finally allowing myself to tell the story from the perspective of the person who had to live it.

I don't know what is sitting in those files today. I don't know whether I'll find the agreement I've wondered about for decades. I don't know whether there will be an obvious answer for why those summers continued. I don't know what the adults said about me, what they said about each other, what was reported to the court, or what the court knew.

And I refuse to pretend that I know until I see it. But I know what happened to me. Those are two different things, and from this point forward I want this archive to preserve that distinction.

There is the child who remembers. There is the paper trail. And there is the almost forty-year-old man who is finally ready to put the two in the same room.

My biggest fear today isn't what I'm going to read. It's that I'll get there and discover the records are gone. I hope 34 years wasn't too long.

I hope somebody kept the boxes, scanned the pages, microfilmed the files, or did whatever had to happen for that history to survive. I hope I don't walk out of those buildings with empty hands and the same questions I've carried since childhood. But either way, something changes today.

I'm done pretending the questions aren't there. I'm done using softer words for what happened to me. And I'm done believing that being the child in the story means I don't get to understand how the story was written.

Today I'm going looking for the paper trail. And whatever is still there, I'm finally ready to read it.